Weekly Notes 25/2026

by Thejesh GN · June 19, 2026

I am back from Chennai. It was fun meeting lots of students, hearing what they think, etc. This time I met some old-time friends, which was a bonus. Conducting the workshop was also fun. I hope to build on that workshop to demystify LLMs further and offer it again.

In the last week, I had not attended to my email inbox, so I did. And also marked really old emails are read. I like inbox zero. Thanks to the folks who re-emailed. Sorry about the delay.

At Uma's school every 3rd Friday is a holiday. — At Uma’s school every 3rd Friday is a holiday.

Uma’s school has started. So we are having an early dinner and going to bed early. I like this routine.
I continued with two P.T sessions. I am doing more and more strength training now. I am also tracking the progress. I have not played in a while. I hope to play next week.
I am scheduled to teach a course called World of Computing at APU starting in August. The content looks great.
E20 has been a problem with my old bike. I see some rust and some rubber being eaten away. Currently, I have a full tank of E20. After this, I plan to switch to Indian Oil’s XP100. It seems like XP100 (IOCL) and Power100 (HPCL) are the only petrol fuels that are ethanol free. They are not cheap at Rs. ₹160/L to 188.04/L, but it seems it’s better to spend on fuel than on vehicle maintenance. When I was a child adulterated petrol was crime and now its a policy :(
I didn’t know about Breadtime Stories, and it’s in my neighborhood. While I was there, I added some details. Added another posbox picture to the collection. I took it on the way to Chennai last week.
Lots and lots of AI-generated spam comments seem to be coming my way. It’s not easy to flag them as spam by reading the comment text, but they all end up liking a shady website. That’s the easy clue. Anthropic was forced to takedown Fabel 5. I have been using Grammarly since 2020 as a desktop writing tool to fix grammar and spelling. Seems like it’s going the opposite way, forcing AI generation on users instead of helping them to write. I have been using their Classic document format in recent months. I am not sure how long I will pay for the subscription. I am sure they will sunset the classic format soon. Maybe that’s the day.
Kage looks like a good CLI tool for downloading any website for offline browsing. It stores content in the Zim file format, an open standard. If you didn’t know, it’s the format Kiwix uses to provide Wikipedia offline. Now, of course, Kiwix has grown and provides more than just Wikipedia. Anyway, since the content is in Zim format, you can use the Kiwix Android app to browse and read it. A good way to carry web content on Android for offline usage. VizChitra/2026 is on the July 4th weekend. I am still not sure about my July plans, so I have not bought a ticket. But if you love data and visualizations, you might like it. Worst case, I might just see all the exhibitions. If you are interested in building your own tileset based on a geojson, then this val by Peter is useful.